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PS2 to Have 10 Year Lifecycle, PS3 Not Cheap
Anonymous PC Gamer writes "CNet is reporting that Sony's Ken Kutaragi has said that he expect the Playstation 3 to have a ten year life cycle. Methinks Sony's production woes are going to be their achillies heel this time, especially in America. Will Sony be able to survive a couple of months of having another expensive, hard-to-find console with Bill and Co. bloodthirsty at their heels?" From the article: "I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households. I think everyone can still buy it if they wanted to...But we're aiming for consumers throughout the world. So we're going to have to do our best (in containing the price)."
Should be "PS3 to have ten year life span...."
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
he expect the Playstation 3 to have a ten year life cycle.
Not withstanding that it should be 'expects', is the PS2 supposed to have the 10 year life cycle, or the PS3 as the article title states?!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
We make the best console for gaming, but it costs $15,000. Too bad you won't get to play it. It's awesome. But if you can save money for 9 years you can still buy one.
forty-two
The DAMN TITLE of your story is completely wrong. No where in the articles linked does it say PS2 will have 10-year life span, which we know is false anyway because the PS3 is being launched next year. Hello, Mcfly???
No sig for you!!
I don't quite understand how they're expecting the PS3 to last 10 years. Given the current pace the hardware industry is advancing, it's unlikely that the PS3 will be too appealing 7 years from now, let alone 10 years. Not to mention how in 6 years, the technology behind the PS3 will be OLD, they'd be able to sell it for $100 US and turn a favorable profit. I can't even begin to imagine how quickly the PS3's hardware will be outdated, let alone it surviving nearly 10 years.
Imagine using a 486 DX-33 to play computer games on, not quite so entertaining is it. With processor speeds and graphics cards increasing steadily over the years, we're going to be expecting a lot 10 years from now. There haven't been many revolutions in games. Today's games follow the same ideas as those from 10 years ago, only that they've been enhanced, both in complexity and aesthetics. Sony must have something really big up their sleeve, if they think that games can continue to evolve the way they are presently, and still be playable on their hardware!
PS2 to Have 10 Year Lifecycle, PS3 Not Cheap
:P
Well ok everyone pointed out the typo in the headline, but it's actually fairly correct...because if the PS3 is as expensive as everyone keeps speculating, my PS2 will certainly have a 10 year lifecycle.
Doesn't the article say the PS3 has the 10 year lifecycle, not the PS2?
So what does this mean? Is sony aiming for businesses that deman premium gaming consoles, or rich bachelors with no life and tons of money?
Everything that I've bought from Sony in the last 5 years has died/broken in about 2-3 years. SOme of my other friends have noticed that as well.
Anyone else have a similar experience?
..........FULL STOP.
So you spend a fortune on this machine, expecting it to last 10 years and after a few years disk read errors rear their ugly head! Great!
Did you get that thing I sent ya?
I think Zonk has been drinking.
Perhaps. His mother certainly was.
Trolling is a art,
This is marketing BS.
Technology, including a game console, will NOT last 10 year, despite the "lifespan" claim.
Every geek knows this.
Opinion: They are probably hoping this makes Microsoft look bad for a somewhat short Xbox 1 lifespan.?
Nice link for the hard-to-find - it's from Feb of 2001 - this is 2005 hardly a hard to find console now.
Sony said this already with the PS2 before its release. It's just a marketing scheme to try and get people to accept their over-priced day-one purchase by saying "Hey, this console will still be sold 10 years in the future it will be so popular!" It all stems from the PSOne's popularity: the Playstation was released in 1995 and is still sold in stores, so it has a "10 year lifecycle", especially since the PS3's appearance next year will push the PSOne off of the market. The PS2 was released at the middle point of that 10 years, and the PS3 will be relased in the middle of the PS2's 10 years. The PS2 needs to last until 2010 for its 10 year lifecycle to be true, and the PS3 needs to last until 2016. The whole lifecycle thing is just speculation on Sony's part based on the PS1's sales curve. If Blu-Ray's not accepted or one of a million other things happens, the PS3's lifecycle might be cut short.
Methinks Sony's production woes are going to be their achillies heel this time...
I want to know, because I don't want to run into this guy in an online game on the off chance he'll say "Methinks" again.
It hurts my brain.
Trying to plan a console to last ten years is ridiculous. Yes, the rate of change has slowed. No, it hasn't slowed that much.
How can any company even remotely guess what will be current and popular in ten years? FIVE years is stretching it. The PS2 was released in late 2000, and it was really obsolete by early 2004. You can (obviously) still get games for it here in 2005, but pretty much everything else on the market was consistently better by then.
If you assume a generation time of 2 years (shorter than the commonly-accepted 18 months, but computers aren't speeding up as quickly anymore), each additional 2 years of lifespan will make the initial console twice as expensive. Microsoft is obviously planning for 5 years, and they're launching at around $300-ish. If Sony wants to last 10, they'd basically have to add two and a half generations' worth more hardware.... they'd probably have to ship at around $1800. And they'd have to guess everything PERFECTLY.
In other words, Sony is hoping for no unpredictable innovations in the next ten years. Hey, that's a bet I'd put billions on!
The PS3 is looking rather like the Itanic, er, Itanium. Sony has spent untold billions on development. Their product will do some things a lot better, but it's not as good at general purpose processing. They can't ship anywhere near the same price point. They're trying to predict the future ten years out, and it doesn't look like they can accurately predict their own ability to ship their product. (They're still dropping features, so they're probably not seven months from putting product on shelves). March 2006 is very likely marketing spin to hurt Microsoft.
Guesses: Sony will ship late (VERY late) and too expensive for the mass market. By the time they get the price to the level that Joe Sixpack will buy their hardware, it will be firmly and permanently in second place. Possibly even in third. It will still be a viable platform, but the XBox will have enormous momentum by then. Sony will never make back what they spent on Cell.
My really daring prediction: Microsoft will actually make money on their console division.
I think the mods have been drinking...
The Neo-Geo will have come company in the overpriced, console graveyard.
The hype for the Cell said that if the Cell in your TV, or toaster wasn't being used to it's limits by that device then it would be added to the power of anything that needed it on your network, which sounds like complete rubbish, but it hints that 1+7 cores at 3.2 Ghz might not be the end of the PS3 line - as Cells become ubiquitous, Sony could simply throw more cores in the box, or sell more horsepower in a box as an add-on.
Maybe we should be looking at this claim of the PS3 having a 10 year life in the same way that IBM's XT has so far had a 20 year life?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I think the mods have been drinking.
Perhaps. Their mothers certainly were.
It's just one of the many reasons they give for the initially high RSP. Some consumers won't overanalyze the marketing meme and believe it to be good reason for a hefty investment, especially parents with nagging kids. Even though 4-5 years down the line a new blackward compatible console will be out.
Wasn't the uber-expensive 3DO supposed to have an overly long life cycle, wasn't it so hardware intensive that it was overly expensive. Wasn't it supposed to have all the Hardware that someone would need for the rest of their lives... Where is my 3DO anyway???
Where's that cap to the Decanter of Endless water???
There has never been a next generation console release that coincided with the end of game production for the previous generation.
Sure, the NES and Super NES coexisted for a while, and so did the Super NES and N64, the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, and the PS1 and PS2, but the N64 was already dead when the GameCube came out in North America.
...Someone needs to put a stop to the spinsters at Sony Computer Entertainment.
:(
Am I the only one who sees this as nothing more than a ploy to make the PS3 appear to be more attractive as an "investment?"
"Invest" in a PS3 because it'll let you play the latest overpriced EA game, watch BluRay movies, manage your finances, even butter your toast! Why buy any other console when this is one is designed to last a DECADE! Only 15 easy payments of $49.95! But wait, call right now and we'll make one payment FOR YOU!
Guh.
They're merely trying to gloss over (or soften the impact from) what'll be an insane initial price point.
Still... when PS2s first came out, people with way too much money to spend plunked down around $800 on eBay for imported PS2s when they began to trickle out into the market. Maybe this time around, SCE should charge a hundred or two over cost and eliminate the middle-men.
At any rate, while Nintendo's vague comments about Revolution are annoying, to say the least ( HA HA.) at least they're not trumping their product up by being a pack of liars.
Ten years? Are they really that dumb? Or do they simply think the buying public is?
Don't answer that.
Nintendo and their "cheaper" revolution is sounding better each day.
Insert Sig Here
So if he's not announcing the price now then when??
...seriously. a ten year lifespan, superpowerful and super expensive. Not every man can have one of these...
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
Why is it I get the feeling this will be a re-enactment of sega's follies with the Saturn?
Just my opinion, I think the real reason that the PSOne did so well was that it was reasonably easy to mod-chip to allow pirated games to work.
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Sony launched it ps2 years before the xbox and now xbox has it next gen cousle coming out nearly 6 months ahead of Sony could this be Sony was milking the ps2 for everythignit worth. As a owner of 5 ps2 stations half of them not working I cant beleive this guy said it would last 10 years get real man maybe in a air tight room with a full time security guard shurley bot my household. ANywas just hope its less than $400 when it comes out but I am going to buy an xbox360 and depending on how good it is I may not buy a ps3
I think I heard or read somewhere that games for xbox 360 and ps3 will be about $60 (new). I like a good game as much as the next person, but isn't this a bit much? If I pay $60 for a game, it better be a *great* game. I also know development costs have risen significantly for these new systems but it doesn't ensure better quality games. I am definitely starting to feel this round of console wars will be won based on overall price and value. Making an initial $600-$700-$800 investment on a PS3 and a few games, memory card, extra contoller, would definitely make me hold off on buying one. An $800 total price tag sounds crazy to me, although it is quite possible.
All powerful computing relies on floating point maths and parallel processing. DSP, Video, Speech and 3D recognition to name a few. Grids make this even better. Set up an OpenMosix cluster of old P1s and run a povray render to see for yourself.
You'll still have your PS3 in 10 years for sure, even if it is connected to your grid of PS4 to 9s.
This is new revolutionary tech and obviously only suitable for us bleeding edge wolves. The sheep can stay safe in their conservative X boxes.
Not targetted at households? What are they targetting it at, the barn?
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.